Kagan on the Difference Between Yale and West Point

The latest installment in the "Conversations With Bill Kristol" series is an interview with Frederick W. Kagan, who talks about his work at the American Enterprise Institute with the U.S military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Kagan, a Yale graduate who taught at West Point, had this to say about the differences between those institutions:

This I think is so important as compared to the experience of your average Yalie, speaking as a Yalie, or a Cantabrigian has. You know, I mean, I think a lot of people go through Yale and Harvard and Princeton and never fail at anything. And I think it runs the risk of making them fragile.

No one graduates from West Point without having failed multiple times and badly because it's designed to make them fail. And then to have them see that you can recover from that and to build the muscle memory for how to recover from failure and how to react to it so that they're generally much more resilient, much less fragile people for having had that experience.